Milhist Thread: Ok, so get this: we name the army groups 1, 2 and 4...

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Milhist Thread: Ok, so get this: we name the army groups 1, 2 and 4...

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

I recently turned 40 and the usual thing happened where I got really into ww2 history books. Masters of the Air led to a rewatch of Band of Brothers and then The Pacific which led to reading Neptune's Inferno and now on the first book of Ian Toll's pacific trilogy. I would like to continue reading ww2 history books after I finish his trilogy covering all the major campaigns. What are like the 10 best ww2 must read books so I can start a list?

# ¿ Mar 11, 2024 16:58

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 03:57

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Hell yeah this is good stuff. Thanks everyone.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2024 18:06

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Really liking the thread title considering I just had a conversation with my mom last night about whether my elderly father still has 50lbs+ of gunpowder stored haphazardly in a mystery location in one of the packed to the ceiling storage sheds from when he used to be big into reloading and whether I might blow myself to bits when he dies and I have to clean those sheds out.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2024 13:41

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Yeah I know realistically it won't go boom but if it still exists and he never got rid of it (who knows) it's been sitting in a shed in the Texas heat for almost three decades and definitely wasn't stored correctly. Also there is most likely black powder as my dad has several black powder muzzleloaders. I have a hazy memory from when I was young that he bought it in 25lb cloth/burlap sacks and that he actually got several hundred pounds because "it was a deal" and my dad overbought stupid poo poo he would never use all of his whole life. I'm not entirely sure that memory is accurate and he very well could have gotten rid of it but his memory isn't to be trusted and those sheds are a hoarders paradise so it isn't easy to check.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2024 15:04

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

bees everywhere posted:

Just make sure it's only gunpowder and not TNT, since TNT will actually become volatile and touch-sensitive if it hasn't been stored properly and starts to sweat out nitroglycerin.

edit: relevant clip from Lost https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgo5c1FgPMk&t=64s

While I'm not aware of any, if we found some clearing out his poo poo it wouldn't surprise me or anything. It does remind me of when I was about eight and there was a giant explosion. We went outside to find my dad ok but singed to poo poo. We were proper country rednecks which meant we burnt our trash in old 55 gallon oil drums out back. My dad had obtained a new (used) one without realizing it still had a lot of fumes in it and was cutting the lid off with a torch. It blew the gently caress up and somehow didn't kill him. The lid went 100 yards one direction and the drum shot the other direction with enough force it hit the neck of big gooseneck trailer and bent it almost 90 degrees. We have a cool painting of my dad and he's wearing the cowboy hat he was wearing that day with singe marks and burn holes in it.

Punkin Spunkin posted:

Wow that's hilarious. Of course. I'm sure there's somebody out there reenacting a Prussian military attache. They'd better all be committing to accents.

And they say white culture don't exist!

But for real, read David Stahel. He's one of the few academics that writes about WW2 and still retains my interest at this point (since no offense to anybody but I read it to death by the time I was like 16 and it's a pretty tired subject for me now mostly, unless its like some interesting niche like the book i picked up that i still need to read about South America during ww2...or any book about the Eastern front not written by some nazi loving churchill-glorifying white guy "anticommunist" type).

What's the South America book? After I get through these books covering more of the main stuff I was planning on finding some super niche stuff like that and I have zero knowledge of what went on there besides probably a lot of spy stuff.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2024 01:23

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

I remember not liking The Pacific all that much when it came out but I just did a rewatch after Masters and I really loved it. It had its problems but I would suggest a rewatch if you haven't seen it since release.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2024 20:48

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

bob dobbs is dead posted:

discord increased revenues 40% year over year this past year, compared to reddit's worst-in-class ad monetization, so don't quite mistake the non-fuckup for the fuckup yet

Reddit is something like the 3rd most trafficked site on the internet and I think there IPO was only around 8 billion. Compare that to things like Facebook and other similar sites and it's pretty pathetic from a corporate greed standpoint. Now that they are public I expect it to get a lot shittier as they try and squeeze as much blood from the stone as possible.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2024 22:47

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

What's the most modern ship to be preserved as a museum? Has there been any since WW2?

# ¿ Mar 27, 2024 03:26

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Urcinius posted:

And here�s all the US battleships and carriers arranged by size:

Plus the original page of US vessels in the US Army-Navy Journal of Recognition.

Jesus I knew the Iowa's were big but not that big

# ¿ Mar 28, 2024 07:08

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

feedmegin posted:

Depending on period. A colonel raising their own regiment in the 17th century (depending when/where) is actually on the hook for all that, plus equipment, and. Is hoping to get reimbursed later. On the plus side it has his name on it and also he gets to choose how to dress his little dollies.

So what I'm hearing is this was just 17th century Warhammer for rich folk

# ¿ Apr 3, 2024 06:12

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Defenestrategy posted:

Was there actually fears about Japanese invasion of the US mainland by the military/government? It seems that considering the huge logistics train required the best the Japanese would be able to do is a garrison force on Hawaii and maybe a bunch of dudes in Alaska.

The federal government and military brass weren't particularly worried about it at all but the state governments of Washington and Oregon made a lot of noise about being afraid of an invasion down through Alaska/Canada once it was known that Japan took a couple of the Aleutian islands. The military chose to not address their fears (at least publicly) because they didn't want Japan to know that they considered the Aleutians a non-threat and weren't worried about an invasion through them. This is all according to Ian Toll's pacific war trilogy.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2024 17:10

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

I know the b-29 had it because of the altitudes it was designed to fly at

# ¿ Apr 9, 2024 05:04

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Fangz posted:

This just isn't true. Read about the ramune production facility aboard the Yamato, for example.

https://www.sankei.com/article/20210503-5AKW52POUNNRLJBU6DOSDLZ6TI/

Wartime desperation started cutting down on these frills, but the japanese recognised that morale is important too. You can't keep crews happy with bushido alone.

Also as people have suggested, the Japanese use of hammocks was probably more comfortable than US bunks, but created fire and space problems.

Looks like I already got beat but the Yamato isn't a good example for the rest of the fleet. It was in a class all its own and was not at all typical of regular IJN ships. It also sat in harbor for almost the entire war because it was too valuable to risk at all.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2024 22:07

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

As far as individual battles go there were several amphibious landings in the pacific that had insane casualty projections and the marines were sure they were going to die and then the Japanese ended up not contesting the landings and they just walked up the beach. It got really bad as they got further in but I can't imagine that relief when the beach isn't the absolute bloodbath you were expecting.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2024 04:32

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Defenestrategy posted:

Are routs a thing in modern warfare, ww1 and beyond, just like one side going, "oh we're getting super hosed." and everyone just cutting and running hard?

I'm reading An Army At Dawn and there has been several cases mentioned during the first amphibious landings in North Africa of troops coming under fire or getting shelled and just turning and running en masse before their officers got them stopped and turned around. I'd never read up much on Operation Torch and jesus was it a huge clusterfuck at the beginning.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2024 20:34

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Urcinius posted:

Man Asses is the battlefield

Is it really called that or is that a typo? I started to Google it but then thought better of it so I am legit asking.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2024 05:48

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Looking for book recommendations for a book or books that cover the eastern front and another for the Korean war in the style of Ian Toll's Pacific trilogy or Rick Atkinson's liberation trilogy.

# ¿ May 10, 2024 18:22

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Nessus posted:

I remember hearing some theory that changes in diet have also changed jaw development which is a subtle but widespread impact on how people look.

Apparently harder foods when younger are important to a strong jaw development and we've largely moved to softer foods.

There's been a trend on the socials in the past few months about how young twenty something gen Z'ers look much older than they actually are. It's all anecdotal but I definitely saw a lot of examples of people that looked to be 35+ that were actually like 22. That's all cherry picked though and when I am out in the world they all look young to me.

# ¿ May 15, 2024 17:18

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

FishFood posted:

I have a question that I'm sure someone in the thread can answer:

I remember watching a video essay or reading about a pre-WW1 gun that was based on incorrect physics but worked anyways. I unfortunately can't remember if it was a bolt action rifle or an automatic system or some kind of artillery piece. There was something about the original designer believing in some kind of rotational/centrifugal locking force that doesn't actually exist, but his gun worked despite this.

I've been wracking my brain trying to find this weird system again but can't seem to pull it up. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

Was it this guy?

# ¿ May 15, 2024 21:03

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Ok milhist thread I saw this in an NPR article of all places. Is this true because I've never heard it before?

quote:

According to Terry Gould, author of The Lifestyle: A Look at the Erotic Rites of Swingers, swinging in the U.S. started on military bases during World War II among fighter pilots and their wives. One in three pilots died in combat, and so they shared spouses with the understanding that the men who lived would take care of the widows

It sounds like an urban legend.

# ¿ May 17, 2024 01:01

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Cyrano4747 posted:

Let me emphasize that I've never read this book and I don't have a copy. It could very well be that he cites something in it and we can trace that story back to some kind of origin, and then judge it on the basis of that.

But, a few things:

1) the author is a journalist. An investigative journalist who seems do to a lot of stuff on the mob, which is kind of interesting. I'm the first person to say you don't need to be an academically trained historian to do history, but it helps and both proper citing of your sources and having a critical eye to judge sources with is part of what makes it useful.
2) and perhaps more important: this kind of history can be really difficult to write in general, just because the source base can be incredibly thin and frequently poisoned by both the dominant cultural values of the time AND the motivations of the people talking about it decades after the fact. You see these difficulties a lot in any non-mainstream sexual topic, or things that impinge on non-mainstream sexuality. It's something that people writing about historical homosexuality and the rise of as 20th century LGBTQ subcultures have had to work with. Now, this doesn't make it impenetrable. Plenty of those books exist, and the sources do exist. But it's more difficult and it takes a lot of methodological creativity and a keen eye.

For example, let's say you have some salacious rumor in elite Victorian English high society circles about a secret society that holds parties at lord so-and-so's estate and conducts "unnatural carnal acts." It gets enough traction to actually get a brief (but appropriately oblique) reference in the society pages of a newspaper, in addition to whatever letters etc. you've got gossiping about it. Now, is this actual evidence of (perhaps non-straight) sex parties in the Victorian upper crust? Or is it a rumor spread for other reasons - perhaps to slander a political rival - that leans into the prejudices of the day? Note that none of this means it's worthless as a source. The fact that people are worked up enough about the story at the time for evidence of it to trickle down to the present day would say something about sexual attitudes in that time and place in and of itself. But you also have to be careful about just stating it as fact.

To make any kind of judgement about swinging fighter pilots we'd really have to grab the book and see how he's written it and what his source is. It may well be a thing that some people did, but which wasn't any kind of wide spread. It may be a weird barracks rumor that got started, or a rumor that was started in the 50s or 60s by people who were already into swinging. Now, we DO have evidence of plenty of non-normative stuff in WW2 fighter pilot culture. Post-war biker gangs are pretty well established to have had a lot of founding members who were adrenaline junkie WW2 pilots who had a lot of PTSD and couldn't really re-integrate into society.

It's a challenging topic to work with and I'd have ot know where the author was getting his claim to make any kind of judgement. That said, I am naturally a little skeptical for two reasons:

1) fighter pilots engaging in communal marriages because of the occupational risks of their job is just the right intersection of a cool group of people and a sexy (literally and metaphorically) topic that it raises a few red flags for me. It's a good story and that always makes me prick my ears up and ask for proof. That's not an automatic disqualifier, but you really have to show your work.

2) just intuitively I kind of suspect that people had the idea of having sex with other people's spouses in a semi-organized way before this. Even if we can definitively trace this as a thing that WW2 fighter pilots did, my follow up question would be what the evidence is that this is when swinging comes to the US? Or is this an instance where something that was already going on only enters the historical record because it started happening with the sort of people who get history books written about them and who others pay attention to in general? Would we even have evidence if there was a swinging culture in working class 19th century Chicago, for example? Not to mention the existence of people and cultures besides the dominant English-speaking, white, American one. "First time in the US' is a pretty bold claim.

Excellent post and your concerns are the same I had and why I asked the question. The story seemed just a little too "neat" to be true. That being said as I've dived into more WW2 history I have been a bit surprised at how much debauchery everybody was getting up too compared to the typical view we have of the sexuality of that generation.

# ¿ May 17, 2024 16:00

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Just got off the phone with my very boomer parents (and I love both of them deeply) reminding them that they need to write down their milhist-adjacent memories (my mom's father worked for a rocket company and my dad was an airedale in the late cold war) because historians like myself actually want to know the bullshit they witnessed. Despite them knowing I'm a historian and my boring them with shop talk over decades of family dinners they still can't seem to put the pedal to metal and actually write their own memories down.

Please tell any relative who will still answer your calls to write down their own memories of things. Historians go to their graves wishing they could read this kind of mundane poo poo for their period of study.

Honestly your best bet is to whip out your phone and just film an interview otherwise they'll probably never get around to it.

# ¿ May 18, 2024 06:21

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Gnoman posted:

It is important to note that Truman was VP not least because everybody knew FDR was dying. It was accepted as a given that the VP elected in 1944 would become President, and Henry Wallace's anti-segregationist and (allegedly) pro-Soviet views spooked a lot of people in Washington so he got shoved aside in favor of Truman.

The other Allies were no less aware that FDR's days were numbered, and thus weren't particularly surprised when it happened.

Interestingly though, despite everybody knowing FDR was going to die and probably soon, they did a really bad job of preparing Truman and making sure he was up to date on all the stuff FDR was juggling. The first few months for Truman was a lot of getting up to speed in ways that shouldn't have been necessary considering everybody knew it was a strong possibility and should have been preparing for it while FDR was still alive.Especially considering there was a war on and one that was going to be done sooner rather than later with huge century defining post-war jockeying and decisions to be made when it ended.

D-Pad fucked around with this message at 05:52 on May 19, 2024

# ¿ May 19, 2024 05:50

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Oops double post

Edit: I'll take advantage of it to say today we had a memorial for my dad and I got to talk to some family members I hadn't seen in years. I started talking with an older cousin about WW2 and I found out a great uncle who I adored as a kid but died when I was young was in the 36th division for the entirety of the war and fought in Africa, Italy, and all the way through to Germany with them. His brother was a belly gunner in the 8th air force.

I had no idea about either of their service previously other than knowing they were both in the war and I was a bit shocked that they both made it through all of that without a scratch. Both of those were very high casualty units. He said he has their military records and is going to send them to me and I'm very excited.

D-Pad fucked around with this message at 06:36 on May 19, 2024

# ¿ May 19, 2024 05:51

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Let's say Franco had joined and Germany was allowed to bring troops in and go for Gibraltar. Would Torch have even been possible? Would the allies have had to land further down the coast of West Africa and fight their way up (which I believe was proposed at one point). Would they have forgone Torch and maybe just invaded Spain? Curious what the possibilities are had Franco joined the Axis.

# ¿ May 21, 2024 02:35

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Yaoi Gagarin posted:

is that actually true? the strait is like 10-15km wide. just because you hold Gibraltar doesn't mean you can throw a chain across like the golden horn

Wikipedia article really only talks about anti-aircraft defenses on Gibraltar during ww2, but the shore guns they most likely would have had in place would easily cover the entire straight. They also had an airfield with over 600 planes in addition to any of the naval forces that were usually there. I strongly doubt the Axis had the capability to force the straight so there might as well have been a chain. Or the allies if positions had been reversed, at least early in the war.

Makes sense Torch wouldn't have happened, but the allies were dead set on getting troops in battle with Germans to take pressure off the soviets and for general propaganda reasons. If Torch wasn't an option because Spain had joined and Gibraltar was taken or even just neutralized where would the blow have fallen?

# ¿ May 21, 2024 04:31

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 03:57

D-Pad: Jun 28, 2006

Nessus posted:

Was Turkey feeling Ally-curious? Could roll up through Greece. Going through mountains and deserts is easy, right?

The problem would be without access to the Mediterranean your supply chain would have to go around Africa and I don't think allied logistics were up to that at the time.

# ¿ May 21, 2024 05:21

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